GENERAL SURGERY

The band that has sated so many in the absence of CARCASS for all those years, Sweden's GENERAL SURGERY get tagged as the ultimate tribute act and it's usually intended as a high compliment. The song titles, the album title (hello? "Analysing Necroticism"),the medical atrocity lyrics, you name it, the fact remains that no one does it better these days. And that includes most bands on the Razorback roster (you'll recall that GENERAL SURGERY appeared on that roster on a split with THE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINERS). You love it and you know it!

It has been a few years since "Left Hand Pathology" and GENERAL SURGERY don't even come close to disappointing with "Corpus in Extremis: Analysing Necroticism". Any way you look at it (and hear it),this is quintessential gory death/grind and it bludgeons its way through 15 tracks that owe as much to early Swedish death metal – including elements of ENTOMBED power drive — as it does to CARCASS. In either case, the band is as surgically sharp as they've ever been without losing one iota of grotesqueness. The album was knocked out quickly, giving it an urgent and live feel to go with the buzzing/burrowing guitar tones and sewage-spew vocals that are surprisingly intelligible for this sort of act. If anything, there is as much groove, songwriting variety (albeit, within the parameters of the style),and memorable structures on this album as there has ever been. "Virulent Corpus Dispersement" is just friggin' perfect — from smoke-billowing groove to blasting intensity and everything in between. Good golly, that first vocal-only chorus burst to get the train running at full speed will have you projectile vomiting with joy. "Dead House" and "Plexus Necrosis" are right there with it too. Then again, so is damn near every cut.

This baby just flat out moves from song to song and there is no time, nor reason, for yawning or thumb twiddling. GENERAL SURGERY is on top of its game here and "Corpus in Extremis: Analysing Necroticisim" will stand tall at the end of 2009 as one of the best representations of the form.